The Secret Teacher: There is an ideal replacement for worn-out written exams. Are we bold enough to embrace it?

Reform schools began as an effort to keep young people out of prison. Reformers were firm in their view that delinquent children were capable of changing for the better and that prison would not achieve this. They believed that in the right environment and under the right conditions these young people would get on the right road.

Media focus on senior cycle reform has been dominated by all-out condemnation of the move to bring forward paper one in both Irish and English to the end of fifth year. Our ideas on what constitutes reform reflect the prisons in our own minds; a prison that limits us from thinking more broadly and freely. It’s both tragic and ironic that education reform in this country is itself high on the list of things that need reforming. Perhaps we need a modern and appropriate version of reform schools to transform how we think about education and set us on a different path.

There are laudable aspects – or at least efforts – in the form of the two new subjects: drama, film and theatre studies, and climate action and sustainable development. But, surely, English and/or transition year has been taking care of one for years and the other has been well-served by teachers of geography (and other subjects), as well as by the massive increase in learning available now via global awareness.

Introducing climate action and sustainable development would have been forward-thinking and innovative in response to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006, but it’s a good deal less so now. How well it works will be revealed in the fullness of time, but there’s a concern here that young people could and should perhaps better lead and teach us on this one.

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Senior cycle experience should reflect youngsters’ journey through junior cycle and anticipate their experience in life afterwards, whether work, college or any other route.

Talk of assessment components worth 40 per cent with the remaining 60 per cent for the written exam holds real promise, but only if we recognise that projects and the like are vulnerable to the temptation to use AI technology. Given that many already enlist the collaboration of family members or the support of additional tuition for projects, this was surely a flawed idea which needed deeper reflection. Simply deciding to expand it lacked imagination. Decisions of such time and reach as a new senior cycle must be right, or at least well-received, and therefore be taken in optimal conditions – not in a reform school, obviously, but perhaps in a retreat centre.

Senior cycle experience should reflect youngsters’ journey through junior cycle and anticipate their experience in life afterwards, whether work, college or any other route. These crucial closing years of secondary follow the already-reformed and now reasonably well-established junior cycle. The advent of classroom-based assessments (CBAs) brought an unprecedented emphasis on oral performance for assessment purposes. Students embraced it, to the surprise of many. Perhaps their online experiences have familiarised them with a culture of performing and recording. Handled well, opportunities to present are a chance for young people to practise skills of real value.

[ The Secret Teacher: Noise of the right kind is a sign that my class is going well ]

[ The Secret Teacher: Binary thinking is wrecking young heads ]

So where is the sense in restricting their senior oral assessments to Irish and their modern foreign language? Here is a perfect opportunity to build on foundations set in junior cycle and get youngsters to deliver a speech instead of asking them to write in their English exam. How much creativity would it take to incorporate an oral assessment in most subjects? Wouldn’t the addition of other oral interviews and presentations enrich our worn-out written exam method? In 15-20 minutes’ preparation time (without AI!), maths or science students could wrestle with a problem before taking to the whiteboard to write up and demonstrate their thinking to an examiner. Handling probing questions on choices made would require them to think and respond on the spot. This would replicate something they are far more likely to encounter in a future workplace than sitting writing for three hours. It would be a privilege to examine students in that way and the young people who suffer over written tests would finally have a different chance to shine.

Because students are the reason teachers do what they do in the first place, this could also change the current narrative around the examiner recruitment crisis. Teachers correct more than enough during the school year and many who choose not to do so during the summer are preserving their energies. But a chance to engage with individual students, to interact with them or simply observe them presenting for a set length of time could be a more energising prospect. State exam correction has long been acclaimed as a phenomenal source of continuing professional development. There is no reason why a broader range of opportunities to examine wouldn’t provide precisely the same for teachers. Awarding teachers such access to what their peers are achieving with students permits new insights into what is possible in one’s own classroom.

Would it be too ambitious to offer our students alternatives? The 40 per cent could be in the form of a project/coursework or a practical or an oral assessment. Perhaps students could be encouraged to have at least one of each. If across seven subjects the assessment elements varied to include orals, practicals and a piece of coursework/final project, we would find ourselves gaining ground away from total reliance on a set of final written exams. This is something that many have been demanding for years.

Yes, the logistics would take some work, but that is inevitable. Reform has been known to cause that when done properly. Merely moving a few pawns around doesn’t constitute the bold and daring moves that many modern students are hungry for. They need us to end the long reign of those final written exams. The longer those exams represent the be-all-and-end-all, the more urgent the need to reform our very approach to education reform.